Viewpoints

North American Companies Know What They Want in a Mobile App

Sep 25, 2017

North American businesses have clearly embraced the idea of deploying mobile software apps to their employees. What criteria are they using today to select these solutions?

In our most recent Frost & Sullivan mobile enterprise applications survey, an impressive 47% of respondent companies (from the U.S. and Canada) reported having already deployed at least eleven different apps for use on their employees’ mobile devices.

Looking forward, mobile worker apps should enjoy a continued, strong growth trajectory with 83% of respondent companies planning to add one or more new B2E (business-to-employee) apps during the coming year.

There are concrete, results-oriented reasons behind the popularity of mobile worker apps. Businesses encourage their workers to use these solutions because they expect the apps to enable:

More efficient business processes

More productive employees

More employee collaboration

Cost savings

More satisfied employees

Enhanced customer engagement

A competitive edge

With stakes this high, what are companies looking for when vetting and choosing these worker apps? Survey responses reveal a number of criteria (ranked in order) with some interesting differences in priorities between large enterprises and small-to-mid-sized businesses:

While all sizes of companies put a high priority on ease of use, ease of management, and dependable data security, SMBs are – no surprise -- significantly more concerned with affordability. Reflecting a stronger need to connect mobile worker apps to third-party and other company systems, enterprises rank easy back-office integration as their top priority (with affordable prices ranking 10th out of 10).

Interestingly, in light of their pricing preferences, it’s the SMBs that value the availability of a premise-based solution while enterprise respondents want a managed cloud-based app. Enterprises are also anticipating expanded needs and are interested in apps that are at the cutting edge in terms of technological capabilities, such as 3D visualization and augmented reality.

Mobile worker app providers and their channel partners are encouraged to keep these priorities in mind when creating sales and marketing messaging.

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